Transportation Research Part F 2 (1999) 201206

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Car following from the drivers perspective

Erwin R. Boer
Cambridge Basic Research, Nissan R&D Inc., 4 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA Received 4 January 2000; accepted 23 January 2000

Abstract In this commentary, it is argued that the car following models discussed in Brackstone, M., and McDonald, M. (Transportation Research Part F (2000), pp. 181196) ignore one or more of the following issues that characterize to observed driver behavior. These include: (i) car following is only one of many tasks that drivers perform simultaneously and receives therefore only intermittent attention and control (task scheduling/attention management), (ii) drivers are satised with a range of conditions that extend beyond the boundaries imposed by perceptual and control limitation (satiscing instead of optimal performance evaluation), and (iii) in each driving task drivers use a set of highly informative perceptual variables to guide decision making and control (perceptual rather than Newtonian input). To elucidate these issues, a general driver modeling framework is presented in which the car-following task is highlighted (Boer, E. R., & Hoedemaeker, M. (1998). In Proceedings of the XVIIth European Annual Conference on Human Decision making and Manual Control December 1416. France: Valenciennes; Boer, E. R., Hildreth, E. C., & Goodrich, M. A. (1998). In Proceedings of the XVIIth European Annual Conference on Human Decision making and Manual Control December 1416. France: Valenciennes). 2000 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Car following; Driver modeling; Satiscing performance evaluation

1. Introduction A model represents how a physical system maps input variables onto output variables. In a car following model, the physical system is the human driver, the input consists of relevant perceptual variables and the output consists of control actions that aect vehicle speed and heading. A model diers by denition from the modeled system because it represents the system at a level of abstraction that is useful for the models purpose. The purpose of the car following models presented in ``Car following: a historical review'' by Brackstone and McDonald (2000) is to mimic driver behavior under a wide range of conditions and to use them in microscopic trac simulation as well as to guide the design of advanced vehicle control and safety systems (AVCSSs). For both
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uses, it is critical that human constraints and preferences are accurately characterized in the model in order to capture and reproduce the source of within and between driver variability. In all car following models presented, one or more of the following issues that contribute to observed behavioral variabilities are ignored: (i) car following is only one of many tasks that drivers perform simultaneously and receives therefore only intermittent attention and control (task scheduling/attention management), (ii) drivers are satised with a range of conditions that extend beyond the boundaries imposed by perceptual and control limitation (satiscing instead of optimal performance evaluation), and (iii) in each driving task drivers use a set of highly informative perceptual variables to guide decision making and control (perceptual rather than Newtonian input). To elucidate these issues, a general driver modeling framework is presented in which the car following task is highlighted (Boer & Hoedemaeker, 1998; Boer, Hildreth & Goodrich, 1998). It is unreasonable to assume that a single continuous controller (i.e., classical control-theoretic model) will be able to accurately represent and predict a drivers control actions. Even though such a model may perform reasonably well under special conditions such as, for example, imposed by the experimental setup and instructions to the subjects, consensus about the general applicability of the model will not be reached because model coecients almost by denition vary widely as conditions change. It is necessary to recognize that the source of the error between the model and observed driver behavior as well as the variability in model coecients between experiments may to a larger degree be the result of higher level processes (preferences and ecient resource allocation to achieve adequate performance) and only to a limited degree be due to low level processes (inherent perceptual and control inaccuracies). The classical control point of view seems to dominate driver modeling activities especially those reviewed in Brackstone and McDonald (2000) because most of the models are based on the assumptions that: (i) drivers aim for optimal performance, (ii) driving is equivalent to the continuous application of a single control law, (iii) drivers use inputs that they may not be able to perceive but are somehow able to compute, and (iv) everything that cannot be explained by the model is noise that can be attributed to perceptual and control limitations. The exible, adaptive nature of resource conscious human operators is often ignored and reduced to a single minded, rigid, resource exploiting system. Experience tells us that the adopted modeling abstraction has been pushed too far as exemplied by the fact that the identied coecients of the same model dier considerably between experiments. The success of optimal control theory in describing pilot behavior is due to the fact that pilots are highly skilled, well motivated professionals who have been trained according to a well dened standard. This is not the case for drivers. By adopting a driver centered perspective in characterizing driving in general and car following in particular, explanations are suggested for the identied lack of convergence and agreement in the collection of existing car-following models. 2. A driver modeling framework The adopted hierarchical driver modeling framework as proposed in Boer and Hoedemaeker (1998) points out three fundamental concepts that are missing from most car following models: (i) drivers are generally engaged in multiple tasks which requires task scheduling and attention management, (ii) drivers use perceptual variables rather than Newtonian variables, and (iii) drivers

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adopt a satiscing performance evaluation strategy rather than an optimal one in trying to satisfy their needs. In general, the human centered cybernetic approach to driving typies drivers as exible adaptive systems that eciently allocate resources in order to satisfy their needs. Further support for the importance and success of this line of hierarchical human operator modeling can be found in Michons driver modeling work (Michon, 1985) and its application in the European GIDS project (Michon, 1993), the intelligent control literature (Gupta & Sinha, 1996), and the human operator modeling literature (Rasmussen, 1985; Holnagel, 1993; Dessouky, Moray & Kijowski, 1995). 3. Task scheduling and attention management For each vehicle control task, it is meaningful to make a distinction between the monitoring and the control process. The monitoring process, once initiated by the attention manager, is decomposed into several stages: (i) pay attention to the perceptual variables that characterize a particular task in the form of a situated state, (ii) use those variables to evaluate current and expected future states, (iii) assess whether performance will most likely remain acceptable for a certain amount of time, and if so, (iv) determine when attention should be given to the task again. If performance is not expected to remain acceptable up to some future time that depends on the number and dynamic characteristics of other tasks to be performed, then the appropriate control process is initiated. Control is described as the employment of a suitable skill to bring the vehicle within a limited amount of time into an acceptable state that is expected to remain acceptable for some time. Dierent skills may be employed depending on the criticality of the situation. Most car-following models appear to characterize only the skilled control component even though they are not presented as such. These models lack the clear initiation and termination stages of skill employment as mediated by higher level attention management and decision processes. 4. Perceptual variables in decision making and control Drivers are limited in terms of the types of variables they can perceive well. For example, they are capable of accurately estimating visual angles subtended by objects, time to contact (visual angle divided by rate of change in visual angle) (Gray & Regan, 1998), heading, and bearing to salient targets (Warren, 1995). Conversely, they are ill-suited to estimate distances especially longitudinally, absolute velocities, and accelerations of other objects in the scene. Perhaps the most distinguishing dierence between man and machine in general that is exemplied in driving is that human drivers have evolved to skillfully use a few generally applicable perceptual variables that provide them all the information they need to maneuver the vehicle, whereas todays machines have not been designed with this powerful attention mediated perceptual lter in mind. The vast majority of models assume that drivers can perceive distance, relative velocity, absolute velocity of preceding vehicle, and/or acceleration of preceding vehicles. The action point model is perhaps an exception but its characterization of opening and closing is based on distance dependent relative velocities rather than Weber ratios on visual angles or the more relevant time to

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collisions. With the adoption of Newtonian rather than perceptual variables, technical measurability and mathematical convenience have clearly won over perceptual plausibility in modeling drivers. Driving behavior can be characterized accurately by a set of time based safety margins (Van Winsum & Godthelp, 1996). This is fundamentally dierent from characterizing driving behavior by averages and standard deviations which is meaningful for xed control laws whose employment is aected by perceptual and control noise only and are intended to represent nominal or optimal performance. On the other hand, the notion of acceptable performance that is bounded by safety margins supports the proposed satiscing performance evaluation. In car following, for example, time headway characterizes the safety margin (i.e., susceptibility to unpredictable decelerations of the preceding vehicle) and time to collision characterizes how much time the driver has to intervene by employing a suitable skill to avoid an impending crash. These perceptual variables play a role in decision making (Goodrich, Boer & Inoue, 1999) and control. Given that all control is shaped by a performance index, their application in control is hypothesized to be through the formulation of this performance index. The fact that this results in nonlinear controllers does not warrant its abandonment as an accurate characterization of driver skill particularly because numerical solution techniques are abundant. 5. Satiscing performance evaluation Drivers evaluate performance based on the notion of an aspiration level (i.e. good enough) or acceptability, rather than on the notion of optimality. Drivers satisce, they do not optimize. Acceptable performance is achieved by committing to any alternative (e.g. situations, strategies, choices) for which the benet of acting on it outweighs the associated cost (Goodrich, Stirling & Frost, 1998). Rather than selecting an arbitrary set of attributes that drivers may value, a more meaningful approach is to try to identify a set of fundamental driver needs that form the cognitive basis of driving. Boer and Hoedemaeker (1998) propose a categorization of driver needs into a set of motivational ones (i.e. what is the goal or purpose of a particular trip) and constraining ones (i.e. what stands in the way of achieving this goal). The set of motivational ones consist of: expediency (to get somewhere fast), kick (enjoyment of pushing the car to its limits), and pleasure (enjoyment of the internal and external environment). The set of constraining ones consist of: safety, workload, economic cost, social deviance (conforming to social norm in driving behavior), and comfort (in terms of acceleration and jerk). The range of acceptable situations can be quantied by adopting a satiscing approach to evaluating the state of the vehicle in relation to the surrounding trac and environment in terms of need-specic utility functions that are dened on a set of task-specic perceptual variables (i.e. situated state). The satiscing tradeo between the values of the motivating and constraining need utilities results in a range of acceptable states in perceptual state space (e.g. a range of acceptable speeds, time headways, and time to collisions). This range and the dynamics of how the situated state is expected to move within the perceptual state space (e.g. based on possible, likely, and predictable events) can be used to dynamically schedule tasks and manage attention. The notion that drivers adopt a satiscing approach to performance evaluation has its origin in the fact that they are constrained by bounded rationality which means that they are limited in

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their ability to evaluate all possible alternatives (e.g. routes, control strategies, control actions, and task sequence permutations) because of limited memory and cognitive processing speed. Moreover, if the current situation and/or progression is acceptable, then there is no reason to look for and evaluate alternatives (e.g. if speed is acceptable there is no need to waste resources to look for opportunities to overtake). Note that optimality requires that drivers expend all resources on trying to improve performance. The dierent need structures among drivers and the manner in which a drivers need structure is aected by external circumstances and mental state are important sources of between and within driver variability. Understanding the source of variability or equivalently acceptability is more informative than focussing solely on matching averages. By modeling a drivers performance evaluation as a satiscing tradeo between multiple utilities that are tied to the drivers fundamental needs, a modeling framework is established that oers a means to gain insight into the magnitude of behavioral variability that is attributed to cognition and emotion. 6. Conclusions Psychologically mediated situation dependent within and between driver variability is a likely cause for the lack of agreement between the multitude of car-following models. The history of carfollowing models clearly shows a parallel development between model techniques that came out of engineering and the models used to describe human behavior. If one is only interested in characterizing human driver behavior and using it in trac simulation models, then a neural net with all possible measurable variables as input may be the next solution, particularly given the fact that many models already look more like general function approximators than psychologically plausible characterizations of how humans think about and solve the driving problem. In this commentary, a psychologically plausible driver modeling framework is advocated as a needed alternative to yet another ad-hoc control law. References
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